Care as though God let you in on a joke about life’s persistent questions and see how the world measures up.

“Don’t let the bastards get you down.” -Grandpa Swenson

Every measure of success is weighed down by our own expectations and buoyed by other people’s inspiration.

For once in your life, get messy and make mistakes like Ms. Frizzle told you to – that’s the best part of life.

Greatness is not measured in quantities of pride and confidence, but rather in one’s ability to stand up against what one fears the most.

Half of life is just showing up and only ten percent of that is what you say – so just be there and listen to the music.

Illness of the heart begins with the seed of doubt.

Life is like a Jelly donut: often unappealing, frequently messy, but always worth the sticky bits.

Kite’s are for flying – the ability to unleash one’s imagination across the sky is just an added bonus – you’d do well to remember this in life.

Letting another person into your heart is one fo the hardest and simultaneously rewarding challenges of the human soul.

Making every moment count is impossible, but if you can make just one moment count every day, it will still add up to a lifetime of happiness.

Never take a good thing for granted. Life is all about the choices we make – some of them good, some bad, but in the end, all of them inspire us to do better.

Overlooking our failures and self-critiques is almost as difficult as letting our individual ambitions and accomplishments shine.

Peace of mind is not attained through acts of self-preservation, but in moments when the preservation of the self comes second.

Keeping Quiet only becomes a solution to a problem when you’re dead.

The three R’s of stress:

1.Relax

2.Reevaluate your situation

3.Ring someone’s freakin’ neck.

Setting yourself up to fail is easy – it’s learning to fight the urge to do so that is part of what makes us human.

Too much of anything means not enough of something else.

Using your head is one thing – making it count for something other than yourself means using the other parts God gave you.

Values depend on the person. Morals depend on the day.

When you hit rock bottom, the only thing left to do…..is to start digging. Then, after a while, you will realize that the energy you put into digging your own grave of wallow and self-pity is actually harder than tredding water in order to keep your head above your own pool of depression for a little while longer. Neither analogy is pretty, but one has fewer regrets.

EXcellence is a by-product of human self-improvement.

Yelling and complaining will only get you so far before you run out of room for the things that are actually important.